Usability - Part 1 of infinity

First of all, thank you to the two of my readers who've forgotten to delete me from their RSS feeds. :D  Love ya.

I honestly think that designers of hardware keep hiring the same guy over and over, not knowing that he is a damn plague on usability and design, and should have been sent back to the fast food empire he was working at before his introduction into electronics.

It keeps me in mind of gremlins, not the cute/scary as hell ones in the movie of the same name, but in that William Shatner episode of the Twilight Zone.  It is this kind of evil miscreant that can come up with the idea that deliberately kills your use of advanced technology. I'm sure this green, bug-eyed monster suggested, hey, if the hyper caffeinated early adopters of tech accidentally click on our crap mouse, then we should interpret that as a mouse click.  Even though no one could conceivably want that, or expect that behavior, it was implemented from here to hell, from those early crap mouse pads to the modern age.

I am 100% sure it was this misfit of thought that first suggested, hey, technical people don't need enough work, let's put a switch on the front of the computer at least 1/4 inch thick, that will suddenly cut off your wireless connection.  Because the tech paranoids (who have every reason to be) are not smart enough to turn off the "automatically connect to ANY network" switch, they need that extra step to make sure that their wireless connection goes down for no reason what-so-fucking-ever.

95% percent of my calls from the "I know you don't do tech support but you type on a computer for a living so you're a genius" crowd end up with, "Do you see a green light on the front?  How 'bout on the right side?"  All the time.  What reason could you possibly have for that?  Other than to confuse the "norms" and make people who work in computers go "why is this happening?" is there a continued reason for this?

If you're one of those people who actually DO connect to any available network, without checking anything or signing in, or doing anything where a big plastic switch could help you, I'd like to say "Welcome to the Wild Wild West, Baby!"